School Career Blog

Nowadays all events in the world are very fast and everything develops and changes with every minute. To be successful in the contemporary world people must have many knowledge and skills and to use them in the proper way. One of the most useful skills for all people, especially for students, lawyers and other persons who have a necessity to read and understand a lot of information, is the speed reading. There also two other important aspects of speed reading: the people have to understand given information and to retain it. According to the researches there are in general five types of reading and each people choose one of these five methods depending on the situation and the needs of the particular moment. These five types of reading are: skimming, scanning, light reading, word by word reading and reading to study. One of the most widespread types of reading is skimming.

Skimming means quick reading with the aim to receive the general impression from the material. The main goal of such reading is to understand if the test is appropriate for the particular reason. In other words, it is the overview of the text. Skimming has common features with the reading of the morning newspapers.

The strategy of the skimming consists of the following elements:

1. Read the title of the text and you will understand the topic.
2. Read the annotation or introduction.
3. Read the first sentences of each paragraph. Usually it is the summary of the paragraph.
4. Read the conclusion. Here you can find opinion of the author, deduction and recommendations.
5. Check your comprehension. Try to retell the content of the text.

The second method of reading is the scanning. It can be compared with the situation where the person is looking for the particular telephone number in the service phone directory. In this case the person does not read the whole list, only scan it. The person is looking for the particular information (in the described case - the name of the particular company and its number). The people have visual image of the particular object.